Because Christianity is bigger than Biblical manhood or Biblical womanhood (Blog of Retha Faurie)

Posts tagged ‘violence against women’

Sometimes, I hear Christians mentioning porn. They agree (at least to each other’s faces) that it is bad, but many of them seem to think the main issue with porn is the lust in the attitude of the one who looks at it. That may have been the case (sort of) in the era when porn meant a nipple-showing young woman (no man on the photo) in a magazine kept under a mattress, but that is not the case now.

In today’s world, more than 80% of the most popular porn show violence, physical and verbal, against women.* Titles of porn are things like “Asian/ Busty/ Latina/ black/ blonde […crude terms for women..] punished/ raped/ gets what’s coming to her.” Actions in pornography are women gagging and vomiting because of rough oral use, women choked, slapped, their hair pulled, penetrated by 3 men, etc.This means that porn is not a fantasy – real, actual women get hurt in making the porn.

And remember that with sex, consent could be withdrawn: If you said “yes” yesterday but “no” today, your partner could not sleep with you today. In porn, the video is on the Internet forever, even when someone in it no longer wants it to be seen like that.

And how does porn user respond to this violence? They get off to it. To get off to women getting hurt is literally to love cruelty. It goes against the second one of what Jesus called the two greatest commandments: “…Love others as yourself.”

Many Christians do not treat this as serious, and even ask women to act like porn stars for their porn-loving husbands:

EXAMPLE
She: “My husband watch porn.”

Well-meaning friend: “Then be adventurous. Do some of the acts in the porn with him.”

WHAT IT MEANS
She: “My husband gets off on cruelty towards women.”

Well-meaning friend: “Then let him take out the cruelty on you.”

Do you notice the misogyny in that assumption?

Misogyny not only shows in the way porn actresses are treated in man/ woman porn. It is even a part of gay and female dominated porn. For example, male subs in porn are usually insulted with words that mean they are not masculine enough – masculine is a good thing they fall short of. With porn done to women, it is assumed that womanhood itself, not failing at femininity, is a reason to mistreat them.

Why, if violence in porn is so bad, do so few people talk about it? One answer is that many people are so blinded to anything else when seeing *S*E*X*!* that they do not notice the violence. To quote anti-porn expert Gail Dines:

“When violence is sexualized, you render violence invisible.”

Another is that treating women as less than, as objects, is so normal in almost all cultures that porn merely emphasizes what most of society – including religious gender hierarchist society – say. When the whole world says women should accept bad treatment and go along with what men want, we are not shocked to see just that in porn.

This violence has a terrible effect on our youth: Children who watch porn do not have any ability to understand how this violence is abnormal, how this is the fantasies of sex offenders acted out on real female bodies. Children, when watching porn, only want to learn what sex is like. Of course, these images are arousing to these young teens, and they learn that sex is violent and violence sexy. Boys learn they should be violent, girls they should enjoy – or pretend to enjoy – any and all forms of violence against them. This is why teen girls nowadays are being treated for internal injuries because of porn-inspired sex.

If you take one thing home from my article, please know that porn is not just against Christian thinking in the “do not lust” sense. It is anti-Christian even in the basic, second-biggest-commandment-equal-to-the-biggest “love others as yourself” sense. If you need another text, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim 6:10a) is still close to the heart of why porn/ prostitution exploits women and children. Lust, too, is better understood if we think of it as a way to see humans as objects for use, instead of viewing it as a desire to do fun things.

Another source linking to how porn leads to negative attitudes: (increased risk of “believing things that would reduce your empathy for a rape victim or lead you to blame a rape victim”, of developing sexually deviant tendencies, and of committing sexual offenses, attitudes that support sexual violence against women…)

I have never read Mary Kassian’s “The feminist mistake”, but I have read this quote from it:

“women grow up thinking that the essense of womanhood is the exercise of personal power – including sexual power.”

Women do not grow up thinking they are womanly when they exercise power. Today’s allegedly free young women in the Western world are Google-ing terms like “what should I do if my boyfriend wants to choke me?” Even when a man wants to do something that could actually kill them, they do not feel they should simply refuse and leave him. They think that it is unattractive for them to have or use the personal sexual power of “no, I don’t want to do it.”

Young women today are told it is wrong (“kink-shaming”) to shame sadistic men. Some men have fantasies of hitting women, treating them as slaves and objects and calling them sexual slurs. According to modern society, these men cannot be criticized for acting out those fantasies, as long as they get the women involved to not refuse.

Many teenage girls nowadays do anal sex – not because they like to do it, but because they believe that they, as girls, should submit to what boyfriends want. Christian culture, despite its insistence on female virginity, also often say that women are supposed to submit to men. Mary Kassian herself contributes to the Christian™ belief in female submission.

What men fear most about going to prison is what women fear most about walking down the sidewalk, and Kassian think women believe that sexual power is the essence of womanhood?

In this world where sexual violence is constantly part of the reasoning and decision making of women (we ask “will I be safe if I do this?”), Kassian not only tells us that “women grow up thinking that the essence of womanhood is the exercise of personal power”, she tells us that sex is God’s picture of how He relates to us, something we would have a hard time to understand otherwise.

You know what, Mary Kassian?

Part of the essence of womanhood, since the fall, is to feel fear of being overpowered and forced into things that harm our deepest being. And in a world where men want to choke, hit, rape or do other acts that give sadistic men pleasure, sex is really a terrible symbol of how God relates to us. Feminists don’t pretend we live in a world where womanhood means exercising power over others. Instead, we feminists work towards a world where we women don’t have to be so afraid of being overpowered, where women’s voices matter as much as men’s. From a Christian perspective, we want a world in accordance with the Jesus who wants us to care for (those seen as) the least, a world that lives by His teachings about not lording it over others.

Dear reader of Kassian’s books or blog, can I make a suggestion to you? Try to read some Christian egalitarians for a while. You may find that we, unlike Mary Kassian, actually speak to real-life situations as they happen on this planet.

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Note:

A fan of Kassian could say that I took one sentence “out of context” from a book I did not read. If so, they are welcome to provide a context by which we could really say that today’s women see womanhood and sexuality more as a power they have, rather than as a vulnerability. I can’t conceive how her statement can possibly be true.